Yo. Before I forget, there are many miscellaneous things you should know. I will now list them.

• Bryan and I were up very late indeed making and installing the SPACE ROCKS! poster (as you see above), and it would be great if you came! It’s next Saturday at the GSD, and a bunch of graphic designers and artists, etc, will be speaking about SPACE. And how it ROCKS, no doubt… the full info is here. Indeed!
• In the course of the making of this poster, I paired Johnston ITC with Mr. Barnbrook’s Bastard Fat, which I am like rilly pleased with in some perverse way. I can’t explain that shit. Rilly, you tell me:

• The day after that, though, I got totally busted by the Mason building’s sysadmin for circumventing the school’s print system. He had documentation of how much ink I had (allegedly!) used, down to the microliter or somesuch. So I am now in some serious trouble. Whoops.
• I love ffffound. My paean to it has been up on SpeakUp for a little while, so maybe you knew that, but still. It’s fucking awesome. Yeah.
• My show went up. I call it “my show”, which is wrong, really; I was one of many many participants in what was the graphic design graduate show, which I curated along with Jerlyn and Hoon. So not at all entirely mine (although I did do the identity posters for it) but in my mind I still call it “my show”, however erroneous that might be. Erm. It was a blast, I’ll have you know, yis.
• Through all of these things, I took copious notes on tumblr, where I post both thesis-related and non-thesis-related miscellaneous shit. In the course of our space rocks work bender, Bryan asked me what the value-add of tumblr was, and I described it much as I described ffffound’s allure: more of a value-subtract, really; the lack of control over minutia that you have with most bloggy things (tags, comments, RSS, APIs, etc) make it kind of a pleasure to use. Many of my friends have been using them, because who cares about most blog features? I, for one, could give less of a shit, for the most part, and so yeah hey.
• I got the thirty-inch monitor, like finally, and the ipod touch, on an impulse. Laura pointed out that these are exactly the things I’d throw out my window, if I wanted to make a Yaz record… but frankly I like “Situation” and its ilk as they are, for the moment. The one thing I will always go gaga for is a bigger fucking monitor, and I think I can safely say with this one that I’m good for a little while w/r/t monitor envy and whatnot. Ok. Yes!
• Looking for thesis advisors. Need to find them, like this week. Can’t I summon my recently graduated friends???? Argh.
• Sleep cycle is pretty fucking abnormal. As such I will kill this list now, cuz bleah. But yeah I have to churn out the writing for thesis, so there will be more drivel here soon, I will warn you. Yis!

love ya

-fish

Yo. So I realize that I throw the term graphics design around without defining it, and that is bad. I would like to take a momet to point out that graphics design is a separate idea and methodology from graphic design. Although graphics designers frequently utilize tools also employed by graphic designers — most notably Photoshop — the practice of graphics design employs its own unique approach to key sub-disciplines, such as illustration, typography, and composition logic.

I thought the history of the phrase was relatively straightforward and local. To wit: At the beginning of fall semester last year, Sue spotted an 8x10” laser-printed ad with tear-off phone numbers, set in Times New Roman via Microsoft Word, advertising the need for a “graphics designer”. The ad went on to detail a fantastically shitty proposition in which you, the putative graphics designer, would do a fantastic spectrum of horribly grueling work for the company in question. Furthermore, you wouldn’t get paid, but “the work would contribute to your portfolio” or some such nonsense.

Sue plucked this ad from the provence of whatever bulletin board she found it, and stuck it on the interior door of the studio. It was the root cause of a great deal of amusement, and the term has fallen into common parlance around here, generally in reference to ridiculous work or amusing addenda to grad student life. Marcos, for example, is new this year, but he employs the term as fluidly as those who were here last year.

I was wrong about all this. Graphics design is a discipline which is alive and well in a scope that far excedes our studio walls, even now. It exists as a parallel to our practice of graphic design, much like the shadow police agency Phillip K. Dick outlined in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I present to you the following:

… I was searching flickr for images of Sue’s original find, and I found the above flyer (originally at this source). This unrelated work sums up exactly what ours did, but it comes from a different place and time. Further cursory googling revealed this website.

It is clear from these examples that graphics design is an entity whose evolution is interlocked with graphic design in some sort of unendingly complex 4-dimensional ballet. That one “s” at the end of “graphics” there makes so much of a difference that I had to point it out. So. Now you know. Tell a friend. Yis.

I have a chronic and long-standing hatred and contempt for my own work. It’s endemic to the profession, generally… like the common cold of design. Or really, any field where making things out of ideas is the stock and trade.

But so: my dear friend GAC, if you don’t know him, is a supremely excellent photographer based in PHL. He can really point a camera at stuff, and he can really whip a llama’s ass with a belt. After I fretted publicly about not having decent photos of my design crapola, he suggested that he might assuage my stated disparity, and we hatched a plan. We had a raucous 24-hour work-bender-photoshoot, some of the results of which you see here.

But yeah: so it’s really really really fucking nice to see someone else seeing your stuff. Whatever one might say about the stuff in question (and a lot of this is debatably not even “my stuff”), it feels SO GOOD to see it from a point of view that is somehow liberated from your own weatherbeaten prism. Like an eyeball massage or someshit. Yes.

Anyway. I’m just sayin’. Wanted to share and all. You should do this, really, if you’re stuck: have your friend do your portfolio, and do theirs in return. It’ll be awesome.

And yeah I’m sure you already know all this shit already, but I am nothing if not grotesquely naive. I mean, I got swindled out of my gizmos by a pituitary mutant. So you probably saw it all coming a mile away. C’est la guerre, no? Yis!